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Thursday, April 20, 2017

FIFA Congress: An Israeli-Palestinian battleground

Next month’s annual congress of world soccer body FIFA is likely
to become the first international forum since US President Donald J. Trump took
office to debate Israel’s controversial settlement policy on the occupied West
Bank.

Israeli efforts to prevent FIFA from debating and possibly
censoring it for allowing soccer teams from Jewish settlements in territory
occupied since 1967 to play in Israeli leagues are complicated by the fact that
Mr. Trump has called on Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to freeze
settlement activity.

Mr. Trump has expressed unconditional support for Israel and
has sharply criticized a resolution in December in the United Nations Security
Council that condemned with acquiescence of the Obama administration Israeli
settlement policy. Mr. Trump, who has made achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace
one of his foreign policy goals, nevertheless advised Mr. Netanyahu on an
official visit to Washington earlier this year that settlements “don’t
help the process.”

The settlement issue is likely to again occupy centre stage
when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas meets Mr. Trump in Washington in early
May in advance of the FIFA congress in Bahrain. In a rare official Israeli
visit to a Gulf state, representatives of the Israel Football Association (IFA)
will be granted visas to Bahrain, a country with which Israel has no diplomatic
relations, to attend the congress.

Israel has in recent years succeeded in thwarting repeated Palestinian
efforts to get its membership in FIFA suspended. FIFA, in a bid to prevent a
situation that would put it in a tight spot at a time that the US Justice
Department is prosecuting a number of its senior officials on corruption
charges, last year appointed South African anti-apartheid icon Tokyo Sexwale to
negotiate a solution.

Mr. Sexwale proposed three options, all of which are unlikely
to provide relief. Mr. Sexwale reportedly initially suggested that FIFA could
take the legal risk of throwing in the towel, give Israel six months to rectify
the status of the disputed clubs, or continue to attempt to achieve a
negotiated solution. Mr. Sexwale, under pressure from Israel, dropped any
reference to a suspension of Israeli membership. In advance of submission of
Mr. Sexwale’s report to FIFA, Israel is seeking to ensure that any references
to punitive action against the Jewish state are removed.

The Palestine Football Association (PFA), human rights
groups and a coalition of sports
associations, trade unions, and faith based groups are pressuring FIFA to act
against Israel. The groups charge that the participation of settlement teams in
Israeli competitions violates FIFA rules, FIFA’s adoption of United Nations
Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and international law that
sees Israeli settlements as illegal. FIFA’s bylaws bar any country from setting
up teams in another country’s territory, or letting such teams play in its own
leagues without the other country’s consent.

“Our growing assessment is that the FIFA Congress is liable
to make a decision on suspending six Israeli teams that play over the Green
Line, or even on suspending Israel from FIFA. We urge you to contact your
countries’ representatives on the FIFA Council as soon as possible to obtain
their support for Israel’s position, which rejects mixing politics with sport
and calls for reaching an agreed solution between the parties ... and to thwart
an anti-Israel decision if it is brought before the council,” the Foreign
Ministry said in a cable. The Green Line constitutes the line that divides the
West Bank from Israel proper and demarks territory occupied in Israel during
the 1967 Middle East war.

Ironically, the cable spotlights the fundamental problem
underlying a lack of integrity in international sports governance: the
ungoverned relationship between politics and sports. International sports
associations and governments maintain a fiction that sports and politics are separate
even if the two are inextricably joined at the hip. The cable serves as
evidence of how governments and associations use the fiction of a separation to
corrupt the integrity of sports.

The relationship of sports and politics is equally evident
in Palestinian soccer. The PFA is headed by Jibril Rajoub, Palestine’s sports
czar, secretary of the central council of Mr. Abbas’s ruling Al Fatah group,
and a former security chief who spent 17 years in Israeli prison.

Mr. Rajoub recently weakened the PFA’s battle with the IFA
by repeatedly
refusing in a debate in New York with an Israeli peace negotiator to
condemn Palestinian attacks on Israeli Jews. Mr. Rajoub has praised in recent
years a wave of knife attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.

FIFA may well attempt to buy time by adopting Mr. Sexwale’s
option to give Israel six months to rectify the situation. A FIFA congress decision
to that effect would however effectively constitute a defeat for Israel because
it implicitly acknowledges that allowing West Bank teams to play in Israeli leagues
constitutes a violation of FIFA rules as well as international law.

While Israel is certain to reject the notion, a six-month
grace period would also buy Israel time to further counter the growing Boycott,
Diversification and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to penalize Israel for
continued occupation of the West Bank. Israel has made countering BDS one of
its foreign policy priorities. The Netanyahu government recently emulated Mr.
Trump’s disputed ban on travel to the United States from six majority Muslim
country by banning BDS supporters from travel to Israel.

FIFA’s groping with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
likely to serve as a bell weather of international attitudes towards Jewish
settlement at a time that many members of the international community are
exasperated with the policies of the Netanyahu government, the most right-wing
in Israeli history. It is also likely to put the Trump administration’s support
for Israel to the test.

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile